This collections of hints covers my experiences when installing the 2.6.0 Kernel on a Debian GNU/Linux System on a Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop.
After extracting the new kernel package, in any case you should
read /usr/src/linux/README and
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/Changes. There you will find
some necessary information when installing the new kernel. On my
setup, I only need a small subset of that information and moreover
some necessary information you will find if you read some of the 593
documents in Documentation. Here I put some of my
experiences.
.configIn the case of using your old (2.4.x) .config to
configure the new kernel, the README points out to call make
oldconfig first. In my experience it's more robustly to create
a fresh .config and walk one time through all
configration parameters.
To use pcmcia you need to compile the PCMCIA/CardBus support (of
course) and the CardBus yenta-compatible bridge support on
"newer" systems as my Dell notebook. Notice that you additionally must
change your pcmcia configuration in /etc/default/pcmcia
on Debian Woody systems. There you set the PIC otion from
i82365 to yenta_socket.
Some PCMCIA cards are now handled by the hotplug subsystem, thus you should enable the PCI Hotplug Support on your configuration. You cold choose this only when you activated Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers at the top of your configration.
If you want to use posix acls on ext2 or ext3 filesystems you should enable this option and install the acl Debian package. To use posix acls you must mount the filesystem with the acl option.
The NVIDIA module need some patches to work with 2.6.0. I fetched the patches from http://www.minion.de/nvidia.html. The patched NVIDIA module will compile, install and run without problems.
You could fetch my .config which is running on my Dell
Inspiron 8200 from here.